Over the last couple months, I’ve been working with the IA Summit folks to muster a Sketchnote Army. It’s been a lot of fun to collaborate with everyone involved—Giles, Vanessa, Kate, and Kevin—and I think we’ve put together a great sketchnote program.

To participate, you can join the IA Summit Sketchnotes Flickr group so you can share the notes you take this weekend. After you’ve joined the group, the Flickr app makes it easy to add photos to the group—look for the “Advanced” option on the Details screen.

When you post your notes on Twitter use the hashtags #ias13#sketchnotes, so folks can follow along there, too.

If you’re not in Baltimore, feel free to participate from afar by following #ias13 on Twitter.

Free stuff, yay!

Thanks to Marriott’s generous sponsorship with Livia Labate at the lead, everyone at the Summit will get a sketchnote kit. It’s all you need to get started:

Rubber band to hold it all together, featuring the Observe, Build, Share, Repeat conference motif and the Marriott and IA Summit logos. (Did you notice that it can double as a bracelet?)

I really enjoyed leading the charge. It was great fun figuring out which items to include in the kit, and I hope everyone feels empowered to give sketchnoting a shot. You don’t have to be an artist to benefit from skechnotes.

Expert help!

Throughout the conference, you can bug any of the officers—Boon Yew Chew, Charlene McBride, Kate, and me—for help or encouragement or just general questions. We love talking about drawing almost as much as we love drawing, so don’t hesitate to say hello.

I’ll be kicking off the event with tips and announcements on Friday at 8:30am in the Blogging and Writing Room and at 12:15 at the conference lunch. We may even have Boon and Charlene hang out with us, too.

Kate Rutter is creating visual notes for all of the keynotes, and she’ll be chatting with us on Saturday at 8:30am in the Blogging and Writing Room and at 12:15 at the conference lunch.

Prizes!

We have twelve copies of Mike Rhode’s The Sketchnote Handbook to give away. We’ll be giving out a couple each day, so be sure to keep up the sketchnoting as the conference continues.

Thank you so much to both Mike and Peachpit for donating them to our army.

Excitement!

As you can tell from all the exclamation marks, I’m pretty excited. I hope you are, too. So, join the IA Summit Sketchnote Army, and capture those talks.